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Investigators analyzed the impact of acute and chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) on outcomes in adult patients with acute leukemia or myelodysplastic syndrome who underwent their first unrelated cord blood transplantation. The effect of GVHD on outcomes was analyzed after adjusting for other significant variables. [Leukemia]
Abstract

Umbilical cord blood (UCB) transplantation is associated with long periods of aplastic anemia. This undesirable situation is due to the low cell dose available per unit of UCB and the immaturity of its progenitors. To overcome this, the authors present a cell culture strategy aimed at the expansion of the CD34+ population and the generation of granulocyte lineage-committed progenitors. [N Biotechnol]
Abstract

Researchers aimed to explore the feasibility of cartilage repair by human umbilical cord blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and to determine the optimal concentrations of the MSCs in a rabbit model. [PLoS One]
Full Article

Scientists found out whether the effect of sodium selenite and selenomethionine on telomerase activity in human umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells was associated with different levels of c-Myc and p53 expression. [DNA Cell Biol]
Abstract

Human MSCs are multilineage somatic progenitor/stem cells that have been shown to possess immunomodulatory properties in recent years. Initially met with much skepticism, MSC immunomodulation has now been well reproduced across tissue sources and species to be clinically relevant. [J Biomed Sci]
Full Article

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The Swedish Research Council announced the grants it will be awarding in the category of medicine and health. The total sum is almost 980 million Swedish krona (SEK), of which KI researchers will receive SEK 524,325,017. [Karolinska Institute]
Press Release

LifeNet Health is expanding its cell-based research and processing capacity with the opening of a facility in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, near Durham. It will be an extension of its flagship research center, the LifeNet Health Institute of Regenerative Medicine, located at the company’s headquarters in Virginia Beach, Va. [LifeNet Health]
Press Release

NIH spending for research on the poorly understood disease should rise to roughly $15 million in 2017, doubling the estimated $7.6 million handed out in 2016. The biomedical agency will solicit CFS proposals from outside scientists to establish several collaborative centers for basic and clinical research, and another center to manage their data on the illness. The calls for applications, which will come with dedicated funds from the planned budget increase, are the first of their kind for CFS from the United States’s major medical research funder since 2005. [Science Insider]
Editorial

Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. [Nature News]
Press Release